America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  In this zone of contingencies, Bulosan found himself struggling to survive with his cohort in the midst of the Great Depression. They became easy prey to labor contractors, gamblers, hired vigilantes, and officials (prohibiting their marriage with whites) from Hawaii to Alaska. Naïve and vulnerable, they nurtured a sophisticated culture of subterfuge and defiance. Bulosan’s friendship with militant unionist Chris Mensalvas plunged him into the campaigns of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the 1933 strike of four thousand Filipinos in California.5 Bulosan soon became acquainted with Richard Wright, William Saroyan, Louis Adamic, and Harriet Monroe, among others. Confined at the Los Angeles General Hospital from 1936 to 1938, Bulosan was shrewdly apprenticed to a writing vocation by Sanora and Dorothy Babb. They helped him discover through books “all my world of intellectual possibilities—and a grand dream of bettering society for the working man.”6 While convalescing, he composed fiction satirizing feudal savagery and colonial despotism, later gathered in The Laughter of My Father (hereafter Laughter).7

  U.S. colonialism dissolved traditional affinities and preserved tribal customs. Bulosan’s adolescent years drew energy from the survival craft of a poor peasant clan in which the fathers and uncles had to reckon with maternal cunning and bureaucratic humbuggery. Just as the wily spirit of his father routed landlords, merchant-usurers, and comprador flunkies, Bulosan’s compatriots deployed their wits to safeguard their dignity. In reconstructing his past, Bulosan revitalized the rich insurgent culture of the dispossessed. He diagnosed the syndrome of a rapidly changing society, its treacherous compromises and pious irrationalities. In response to the philistine put-down of Laughter as a mode of commercializing exotic mores, Bulosan urged us to attend more to their immanent critique: “My politico-economic ideas are embedded in all my writings. . . . Laughter is not humor; it is satire; it is indictment against an economic system that stifled the growth of the primitive, making him decadent overnight.”8 Other stories by Bulosan (in The Philippines Is in the Heart) exuded “hidden bitterness” couched in dark humor, his antidote to an imputed pastoral optimism. They historicized folktales lampooning the impostures of the oligarchy and the iniquitous property relations sanctioned by the prevalent social Darwinist ideology of the time.

  Agonizing over his kin’s tribulations, Bulosan rediscovered the homeland in the archive of peasant rebellions. Self-centered alienation begot its opposite in trusting collaboration. Bulosan’s education as an emergent intellectual of the diaspora began with the effort to understand the trials of his family to endure feudal-colonial outrages. Critical distance and historical perspective overcame despair. Although Laughter and AIH evinced his creative potential, unlike his contemporary José Garcia Villa, Bulosan was never really accepted by the Establishment literati. He remained suspect, a disgruntled pariah from the “boondocks.” His radicalization was sparked by acts of spontaneous remembrance triggered by rabid ostracism. Even before his anger and fear subsided with the war’s end, Bulosan had already outlined his project of reappraising the U.S. cultural landscape with his claim: “I want to interpret the soul of the Filipinos. . . . What really compelled me to write was to try to understand this country, to find a place in it not only for myself but for my people” (“Autobiography,” 267).9

  MAPPING THE LABYRINTHINE ROUTE

  Originally acclaimed as a poignant testimonial of ethnic success, AIH’s epilogue envisages a popular-front response to international fascism. Written during the war, Bulosan’s quasi-autobiography (its narrator functions as a mediating persona) unfolds a geopolitical transcript of those years of thwarting white-supremacist violence. Obliquely parodying the bildungsroman model of growing up, AIH presents a thick ethnography of various patterns of brutal exploitation and spiritual injury suffered by Filipinos from the Depression to the end of World War II. Drifting in a limbo of indeterminacy, Bulosan survived years of ignominy and unquiet desperation, nurturing libertarian affections and perceptions. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, he conceptualized his ordeals: “Yes, I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And the crime is that I am a Filipino in America.”10

  We are confronted outright with scenes of abuse, arrests, and the ruthless killing of Bulosan’s companions. Basically, the narrator (as protagonist or witness) charts the passage of the youthful sensibility through a landscape of cruel privations and melodramatic entanglements. Snapshots of history are spliced with incidents of strife, escape, and recovery—a tense montage mixing public events, confessional diary, and raw frontline reports. Bulosan’s itinerary of self-discovery begins with his victimization by corrupt businessmen upon his arrival. After a series of escapades, the narrator concludes, Pollyanna-like, by vindicating his faith in “America”—it’s no longer an arena of painful bloodletting but a magical space “sprung from all our hopes and aspirations.” Readers are stunned by the stark disjunction between the harsh reality and the compensatory frame of the commentary. How do we reconcile this incongruity between actuality and thought, ugly fact and glamorized “America”? Is this simply a sly maneuver to hide subversive author behind credulous narrator?

  One way of clearing up this impasse of discrepant readings has become routine. We need to reject the thesis that this work belongs to that genre of personal reminiscence designed to induce easy assimilation into the proverbial “melting pot.” It is congenial to welcome AIH as a specimen of a new artistic invention that functions as the negation of the foolish scheme for whitening dark-skinned subalterns. This prompts us to value rhetorical nuances, such as the address to the “American earth” cast in the subjunctive mood, overshadowed by the disasters of Pearl Harbor, Bataan, and Corregidor.

  FORKING ARGUMENTS, CONVERGING QUESTIONS

  The mainstream approach to Bulosan’s work is charitable but disingenuous. To judge Bulosan’s chronicle of the Filipino struggle to restore damaged lives as an ethnocentric language game seems unconscionable, if not invidious. Essentially, we are following a story of a group lost in a maze of delusions, harassed, trapped, and compelled to find out who they really are by exigent conduct and self-reflection. The Bulosan-persona’s storytelling is an allegorical search for purposeful identity via group empathy. Deploying the underdog’s ruses, he grapples with the bifurcating trajectory of his passage through the capitalist maelstrom. Seeking to unify fragmented lives, he moves apart but later rejoins his group when he extols the “simplicity of their hearts, nourished in the conviction that ‘America’ is still our unfinished dream.” Purged of his narcissistic malaise, he proudly announces: “I was rediscovering myself in their lives.” Thus the idea of containment imaged by the title refers to a labor of intensifying self-awareness: in effect, “America” as heterogeneous experience becomes condensed in the artist’s sensibility, the informed heart.

  Using this quest for identity as a point of departure, we discern the crucial turn of Bulosan’s life in chapter 23. Struggling to communicate with his brothers, he reconstitutes his past and gains release from the prison of silence to “tell the world what they’ve done to me.” The victim recovers poise and mutates into a participant fusing theory and practice. This discovery of the capacity for truth-telling speech occurs after he rebels: “I had struck at the white world, at last; and I felt free.” When he meets the lawyer Pascual, Bulosan recovers his reflexive identity and assumes his role as witness/spokesperson for grassroots mobilization. Meanwhile he reconceives literary art as the symbolic theater of his death and rebirth, and his role within it as a transformative agent, a productive “transindividual”11 belonging to a community of equals, acting in synergy with nature and secular traditions.

  A decisive break occurs in the end, which downplays the iconic aura of the assimilated subaltern. Bulosan’s fantasy of making “a better America” is aborted by the body’s collapse. History’s upside-down tendency manifests itself in the return of the narrator as “child”/invalid, the voyager’s hubris now displaced by the impact
of his odyssey. Epitomized here is the vitality of the romance genre12—the cycle of death and rebirth with its contrapuntal dialectic of tragic and comic elements. Bulosan celebrates several deaths, one of which is the suicide of Estevan, which precipitates a profound conversion: “I began to rediscover my native land, and the cultural roots there that had nourished me, and I felt a great urge to identify myself with the social awakening of my people.”

  INVENTORY OF THE SPIRIT

  What is timely to pursue here is the motif of a prophesied homecoming performed in the dream (chapter 40), a synecdoche for what is repressed. Mistaken as “the Filipino communist” strike leader, Bulosan flees from the police. Asleep on a bus, he dreams of his return to his hometown, rejoicing at seeing his mother and the whole family eating together. Jolted by “tears of remembrance,” he asks himself how the “tragedy” of his childhood had returned in his sleep “because I had forgotten it.” What had been erased from the psyche was his adolescence, an amnesia of profound ethicopolitical significance. Meanwhile we detect a symptomatic shift in texture and style. The memoir’s realistic stance and its picaresque naturalism (marked by the intrusions of rough idiom, squalid atmosphere, etc.) are disrupted by nostalgic, lyrical evocations of a happy, beautiful homeland. By this time, the norms of conventional fiction, with its typical coding for verisimilitude and linear plotting, have already been scrambled by a comic rhythm of parody and carnivalesque debunking.

  After the dream, we observe how the narrator’s ego merges with the spirit of an enlarged ensemble whose members are bound by a transcendent purpose: the worldwide crusade against fascist terrorism. This connects with what Bulosan would later call “the revolution” where workers would “play our own role in the turbulent drama of history . . . the one and only common thread that bound us together, white and black and brown, in America.” Earlier, Bulosan harped on the notion of the old world dying while a new world is struggling to be born: “America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom . . . a prophecy of a new society.” Framed by Bulosan’s cathartic discovery of his writing prowess, the invocation of “America” as a multiethnic army of workers reconfirms his project of rearticulating the discourse of immigrant rights in a communalist direction. Note how the story’s register switches from a catalog of pain to a visionary prospect of an emancipated future. This utopian theme of regenerating his coworkers within the morass of a decaying order qualifies the text’s morbid realism while the insightful tone compensates for the disoriented narrative flow and the episodic plot.

  Eventually, the call for partisanship animates the rationale of his support for the proletarian vanguard in the Spanish Civil War—the key historical contradiction in the book that subtly inflects the polarities of city and countryside, metropole and colony, innovative consciousness and the instrumentalizing public sphere. Bulosan’s journey now arrives at the all-embracing principle of the popular-front-against-fascism. It offers one mode of reconciling an idealized America and the actuality of racist dehumanization. The dissolution of the old order signaled by the war’s outbreak offers the chance to resolve the tension between vacuous idealism and mimetic historiography, a compensatory fulfillment of the native’s aspirations. As exiles “socially strangled in America,” Filipinos (Bulosan speculates) find it easier “to integrate ourselves in a universal ideal,” serving as organic tribunes of the “wretched of the earth.”13

  ENGAGING WOMEN’S TIME

  From a historical-materialist perspective, AIH may be appraised as an example of a new literary form, a popular-front allegory capturing the frightful landscape of the Depression and total warfare. This form articulates the problems of class, race, nation, and gender in an overdetermined unity of opposites—a troubling cacophony of voices (Bakhtin’s heteroglossia),14 the irksome undecidability of DuBoisean consciousness. To clear up this dissonance, we can foreground the trope of personification, the riddle of what signifies “America.” Bulosan answers: Eileen Odell “was undeniably the America I had wanted to find in those frantic days of fear and flight. . . . This America was human, good, and real.” If Eileen serves as a placeholder for all those who demonstrated compassion for its victims, then “America” is not a chimerical, abstract place. Rather, it alludes to a redemptive force, the locus of a germinal, nomadic desire.

  What I think constitutes AIH’s originality is its rendering of what Julia Kristeva calls “women’s time.”15 This is the work’s subtext or “political unconscious.”16 Probing women’s role in Bulosan’s “pilgrimage,” we encounter representatives of its Otherness, its demystifying double. One recalls how Bulosan praised the exuberant resourcefulness of his mother, that “dynamic little peasant woman”: “[T]o know my mother’s name was to know the password into the secrets of the past, . . . a guiding star, a talisman, a charm that lights us to manhood and decency” (this page). Her uncanny figure is sublimated in the feisty women challenging patriarchal authority. She is reincarnated in Bulosan’s caring companions, symbols of the disavowed “Other” opposing an indifferent if not inhospitable America, making AIH a protofeminist discourse interweaving the nomadic and sedentary lines of flight and confrontation.

  An intriguing approach to AIH’s complexity is to consider it a hypothetical construct meant to resolve lived conflicts by an imaginary resolution. We can explore this angle by inquiring into women’s time, the subterranean logic of need and desire. This would modify the reader’s horizon of expectation since what this recollection wants to forget, but cannot, is a lacuna whose subliminal traces serve as the stigmata of insurrectos: the genocidal U.S. pacification that preserved comprador-landlord power. The comprador-landlord bloc suppressed numerous peasant uprisings and drove Bulosan and his generation into exile.17 Toward the end, Japanese aggression evokes the U.S. conquest, the primal shock of deracination becoming the repressed traumatic object. In effect, what Bulosan wants to salvage are the ruined workers whose bodies and souls have been price-tagged by the devouring flux of “America,” where Filipino bachelors have found themselves symbolically, if not literally, castrated—a life-world corrupted by the predatory market and acquisitive individualism now sanctified by the bankrupt administered culture reigning worldwide.

  EXILE’S RENDEZVOUS

  The war was almost over when Bulosan’s adventure halted. MacArthur’s slogan, “I shall return,” had fired up Filipino hopes, motivating Bulosan’s reassessment of the total experience of his generation. In this context, the intent of AIH can be construed as the reinscription of the inaugural moment of loss in the archive of American “exceptionalism.”18 We witness in the end the ambivalent gestures of the narrator striving to find coherence and intelligibility, to universalize the lessons of his experience. Prophetic reminiscence foregrounds the tillers’ cooperative sharing and maternal love as the ground of spirit and destiny. The final episodes intimate “a return to the source,”19 inducing a need to valorize a durable tradition of plebeian resistance based on solidarity, the concrete universal of this artifice.

  Whatever the readers’ prejudices, AIH seeks to provoke everyone about their role in the open-ended drama of social transformation: “Our world was this one, but a new one was being born. We belonged to the old world of confusion; but in this other world—new, bright, promising—we would be unable to meet its demands” (this page). This book calls for the renewal of the incommensurable energies in concrete experience, the oppositional and the utopian drives stifled by commodity fetishism. For this purpose, we need an interpretive method to transcode the dilemmas portrayed here into humankind’s agon of exposing lies, discriminating what is reactionary and what is life-enhancing, in the bewildering panorama of daily life. Mindful of the uncouth realism used to depict existential truths, we can appreciate AIH’s modernist temper in privileging self-reflexive inquiry and secular humanism. Has the postmodernist taste for cynical deconstructivism rendered this book inutile? Extrapolated from the vicissitudes of popular-democratic struggles, AIH allegorizes
the transformation of the old system of colonial servitude and silence into a contested space where embodied ideas clash, catalyzed by historic contingencies. This process of decolonization personified by the witness/testifier of AIH aims to fashion a responsible transindividual subject, not a hustling entrepreneur, through rational analysis and convivial exchanges.

  Given the responsibilities Bulosan wrestled with, we can appreciate how the evolution of his sensibility transcended the demands of sectarian ideology, the cult of a nativist golden age, and hedonistic cosmopolitanism. No doubt Bulosan’s “conscientization”20 transgressed nation-state paradigms and upheld proletarian internationalism. Bulosan’s engagement with the popular-front strategy afforded him a synthesizing worldview that gave direction to his group’s wayward journey. When war broke out, Bulosan rediscovered the beleaguered islands as the mainspring of his commitment to national-democratic emancipation in AIH, as well as in The Cry and the Dedication (hereafter The Cry), a novel inspired by Bulosan’s friendship with the socialist poet Amado V. Hernandez, with whom he collaborated in publicizing Luis Taruc’s autobiography, Born of the People.